


control

by miss_belivet



Series: the wonder poison archive [4]
Category: Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Force-Feeding, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Interrogation, Kidnapping, Pre-Relationship, Rescue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 09:58:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11288907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_belivet/pseuds/miss_belivet
Summary: For polarbeary's prompt on tumblr: "You cannot break what is already broken."After Diana finds Isabel after the war and before they return to Themyscira.





	control

When Doctor Maru wakes up, her clothes are drenched with icy water and her hip is aching against the rough, stone floor where she lays. A heavy metal door is planted between her and the only exit, and she sees a dark shadow peer at her through the small window set halfway up the iron slab.

She wonders if this is how her test subjects felt, shivers with a brief thrill, and then shudders more violently from the biting chill of the water.

xXX

Time floats past, as vaporous and uncontainable as one of her poisons. Trays of stale bread and frozen butter appear; she doesn’t consume anything until four men march wordlessly into her cell, hold her down, and pour a thick, heavy mixture into her stomach with a tube. One leaves a pile of wool—skirt, stockings, sweater, gloves, cap—in the corner, and that is the day that Isabel knows she is not going to die by their hands.

xXx

_“Doktor Gift.”_

Isabel grins, unrestrained by any mask.

She is dealing with Germans. It makes sense—the last place she remembers before her cell is Berlin—and she sits back in her chair, ignoring the bruises and joints that protest after weeks spent on a stone floor. Germans are notoriously easy to provoke _._

Her interrogator overturns a box of her notes onto the table, slides a pad of paper with rough and incorrect translations over to her, and orders her to translate. She transcribes the plot of a gothic novella by a French author in Latin, intersperses it with nonsense formulas, and watches him leave.

Her next interrogator speaks Spanish and shows off a gleaming set of scalpels and tweezers in a leather roll. He gives her the notes, the pad, and several new scars, but his nerves appear to get the best of him when she details the way her skin melted away from her face and into her hands when she poisoned herself.

She doesn’t know what they want her poisons for, but she will not allow them to use her formulas without her consent.

The next one knows a handful of languages and produces a small photograph of a blonde woman behind a cracked glass frame. A bit of pink lace follows, and Isabel bristles— _wheredidtheyfindithowdidtheygetit_ —and he smiles calmly at her. _She will die if you do not translate your code_. _Come, Doctor Maru, be reasonable_.

Isabel stares at him, a look made heavy by violation and hatred, before she starts to laugh. It’s hoarse and painful, courtesy of the feeding tubes, but she does not stop until her hand is crushed beneath a loose brick. She shrieks and snarls at him, pulling her shattered hand to her chest and muttering curses beneath her breath until he gives up.

(He leaves the old scraps of her memories behind, and she hides photograph in the waistband of her skirt and the lace in the twist of her bun, unwilling to see either lost to this freezing, empty place. The broken glass cuts her, and she curses her sentimentality.)

xXx

Months pass, measured only in the protrusion of her ribcage and the ache in her bones, before her heavy door is wrenched off its hinges, the stone casing crumbling around it. Isabel is more resentful than she is relieved when long legs sheathed in leather armor stride into her line of sight; she’s curled on the floor, helpless and hungry, and hates this woman for witnessing her at her lowest point a second time.

Later that evening, she finds Isabel again, as is quickly becoming an annoying habit, in the hospital where the anonymous medical responders left her. She brings a pot of coffee, surely stolen from the nurses’ station, and pours a cup for Isabel.

“They kept files of your... confinement. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You are sure?” Her inoffensively polite tone does not change, but Isabel can tell that she wants a more substantial answer.

"I am."

Isabel watches with a sharp eye as the other woman stands, runs her fingertips over the top of the framed photograph on the bedside table—the lace now tucked into a corner—and then presses that hand to the pocket of her own coat. For the first time since they met on a burning tarmac, her lips turn down in some unspoken sorrow and she nods. She doesn't meet Isabel's eyes again before she leaves, but the tension that has always existed between them has changed, softened, and Isabel loathes her for it.

"If you say so. I left my contact information with the nurses; I will be in town for the next several months. Call for me if you wish."


End file.
